Posts Tagged ‘Cliffski’

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The upcoming tycoonist car factory game Production Line [official site] has been travelling along the development assembly line since its announcement in September last year, getting bits and pieces welded on by creator Positech. Now it’s ready for the next phase. The giant machine-like claws of Steam early access are waiting to tear it asunder and put it back together again from May 18. “This also signifies that I think the game is ‘good enough’ at its current state to be considered an Early Access title,” says developer Cliffski, who in this metaphor is, like, a foreman with a high-vis jacket or something. Here’s a wee trailer.Read the rest of this entry »

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You can have any genre, says Positech, as long as it’s management. Production Line [official site] will be the studio’s new game of building cars on a long assembly line with the penny-pinching efficiency of Henry Ford. “I never used to care about cars,” said Cliffski, the creator of Democracy and Gratuitous Space Battles, in his announcement. “Then I bought a nice hybrid one (Lexus) then I bought a stupidly flash electric one (Tesla). I started to realize cars had become interesting to geeks, not just petrol-heads.” Right so. Here’s what we know so far.

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If there’s one thing better than tanks fighting it out, it’s tanks fighting it out for no reason other than because they are tanks. Let Tanks Be Tanks should be the subtitle of Cliffski‘s RTS, Gratuitous Tank Battles. Followed by three exclamation, because nothing says gratuitous than ‘!!!’. Even the sound in this video is gratuitous: Cliffski has recorded 7 minutes of the game playing, showing off his development tools that he’s choreographing the tank violence with. Unfortunately, the tanks are so loud that he had to set his mic up to compensate. This set off a tit-for-tat response with the game that ended up with his mic being declared a war crime. It’s loud, people.Read the rest of this entry »

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Hello 2012! The observant among you may have noticed that I appeared to write something yesterday but I actually wrote that in 2011. Yesterday, I was still in a burrow eating the last needles of the Christmas tree in preparation for emergence. The first thing I saw as my eyes adjusted to the light was a developer diary for Gratuitous Tank Battles, so I brought that with me. Within, Cliff puts forward two game design proposals. One, “a sort of Upper Class World War I English General Simulator”, the other a game taking place during a war that has spanned centuries, leading to battlefields strewn with laser-spewing Tiger tanks, tiny infantrymen and robots alike. He’s making the latter. We must demand the former as well.

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The lovely Cliffski has put up a new developer diary detailing the forthcoming Gratuitous Tank Battles, this time talking about what exactly Gratuitous Tank Battles is. Which appears to be a blend of the sensibilities of previous fleet commander sim Gratuitous Space Battles with the pathfinding of a tower defence game. No, quiet in the back there, settle down. It isn’t your typical tower defence game, see. Let Uncle Cliffski explain.

Galactic Conquest is a big ol’ update, adding a brand new campaign mode where you battle for planets and gradually build up fleets using captured shipyards and academies. As Jim pointed out, a campaign mode surely makes all those space battles much less gratuitous. Less Gratuitous: Space Battles, that’s what Cliffski should have called it. Full, lengthy features list and video after the jump.Read the rest of this entry »

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Cliff “Cliffski” Harris, creator of Kudos, Democracy and Gratuitous Space Battles, is launching another survey of his Positech customers to learn about their purchasing habits. Or more specifically, their lack of purchasing habits. He’s asking people, “Why didn’t you buy Gratuitous Space Battles?”

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Earlier today we talked to Positech’s Cliff “Cliffski” Harris about his new game, Gratuitous Space Battles. There was also some discussion of a Saddam Hussein sim, the pitfalls of outsourced indie art, and the problems of small-playerbase multiplayer.Read the rest of this entry »

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Space is gratuitous. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly gratuitous it is.

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Gratuitous.

Ack, it’s no good. I just can’t decide which stereotypical sci-fi quote to tiresomely rip-off. Instead, just watch this video of Cliffski ‘Gets A Bit Feisty’ Harris’ new’un. BOOM.Read the rest of this entry »

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Positech have been busy capturing the essence of spacewar for their new strategy/management/simulation game, Gratuitous Space Battles, and we get a glimpse of it here: giant, glacial capital ships firing colossal beam lasers through swarms of tiny fighter craft. Yeah, that’s the stuff. Cliffski knows what to do. Now go! Witness those titular space battles below. (And I have to say, this one really interests me, and not simply because I’m an unmitigated spacewar nerd.)Read the rest of this entry »

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Just in case you’re casting about for something to play in the dark hours of our Northern Hemisphere winter (damn you, Southern Hemisphere dwellers!) Cliffski has put up a new demo for the rather realistic governmental simulation Democracy 2. It’s a genuinely excellent game with lots of icons, and we all love icons. But there’s more than icons: there’s brains too. And they’re not so visible. Anyway, Kieron discusses the game in a bit more detail here. The new demo is here, and there’s a patch out for those of you who already own the thing.

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Behind the faux-futuristic moniker of Positech stands one man. Cliff “Cliffski” Harris has been quietly working up his own catalogue of indie-games since leaving Lionhead, shortly after they shipping the Movies. Having experienced both indie and mainstream development, produced a string of games – Democracy, Kudos, Rock Legend – that are clearly chasing after a grail seperate from the majority of developers and managing to earn a living from what may at first appear niche games, Cliff has a lot of things to say. And, as anyone who’s every followed him in a forum thread, he’s not a man for mincing his words. We talk about his origins, how he feels he’s grown up as a developer, how he actually manages to feed his cats and how he believes a game can be “anything”.Read the rest of this entry »